Proceedings of the Tenth International AAAI Conference on
Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2016)
Space Collapse: Reinforcing, Reconfiguring and Enhancing
Chinese Social Practices through WeChat
Yang Wang∗ Yao Li† Bryan Semaan∗ Jian Tang‡
ywang@syr.edu, yaol16@uci.edu, bsemaan@syr.edu, jiantang@cufe.edu.cn
∗
School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, USA
†
School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA
‡
School of Information, Central University of Finance and Economics, China
MIMs have emerged as a popular outlet for social interaction, but their uses are still under-studied. Second, the dearth
of prior literature on MIM studies are dominated by popular
MIMs in North America such as WhatsApp. The fact that
China has the world’s largest Internet population and has
become a key part of the global MIM market calls for more
research on this under-studied user population. Third, and
most importantly, unlike other MIMs, WeChat juxtaposes
features supporting user interactions with their known ties
and complete strangers. These characteristics make WeChat
a theoretically interesting case to study MIM use.
Our work makes two primary contributions. First, we provide a highly contextualized account of WeChat uses, highlighting how WeChat reinforces and challenges existing social practices, but also enables new practices. Second, using WeChat as a case study, we propose a new theoretical
concept, space collapse, which denotes the emergence of
a fourth space where public, private and parochial social
spaces are collapsed together in a socio-technical system.
This concept can potentially be used to understand social
computing systems in other contexts.
Abstract
WeChat (a.k.a., WeiXin) is a popular mobile instant messenger (MIM) with various social features and has most of
its users in China. Whereas recent scholarship suggests that
MIMs could support users to “dwell” together with close
friends and family members and to have “fleeting” encounters with strangers, little else is known about WeChat use. In
this paper, we present findings from a qualitative investigation
of WeChat use and its impact on Chinese social practices.
Drawing from 36 interviews conducted between 2013 and
2015, we provide a contextualized account of how WeChat
use reinforces, reconfigures, and enhances existing Chinese
social practices. We propose a new theoretical concept, space
collapse-that denotes the emergence of a fourth space where
public, private and parochial social spaces are collapsed together in a socio-technical system. We discuss how these results deepen our understanding of MIMs.
Introduction
Mobile instant messengers (MIMs) such as WeChat, WhatsApp, Line, Kakao Talk and Facebook Messenger are gaining popularity worldwide. MIMs are designed to support
users’ interpersonal communication in a more flexible way.
MIMs have transformed relationship maintenance from offline to online environments and have provided more opportunities for users to keep in touch with their close friends and
family members (O’Hara et al. 2014).
WeChat (a.k.a., WeiXin in Chinese PinYin) is a popular
mobile instant messenger (MIM) with most of its users in
Mainland China. By Nov. 2015, it had retained more than
650 million users (Tencent 2015). WeChat provides a mixture of functionalities that go beyond what is offered by any
of the other MIMs. WeChat includes regular communication
features such as text messages, voice messages, audio and
video calls, and chat groups; common SNS features such as
friending, posts/comments, Moments (like Facebook newsfeed); and novel social features such as Shake that enable
opportunistic interactions among strangers.
In this paper, we present how WeChat uses reinforce,
reconfigure and enhance existing Chinese social practices,
drawing from 36 semi-structured interviews of WeChat
users. Our work was motivated by several factors. First,
WeChat Opportunistic Social Features
WeChat provides three novel social features: Shake, Drift
Bottle, and Look Around1 that enable opportunistic interactions between random users on the platform.
Shake, as shown in Fig. 1, matches a pair of users who
shake their phones at the same time. A user literally shakes
his / her phone. While shaking the phone, WeChat plays
a crisp, rifle shooting sound. Then another user who also
shook his or her phone is matched and shown on the phone
screen. The user can choose to send a greeting to the other
(matched) user or ignore their match altogether. Shake helps
users initiate a conversation with another user, coincidently,
by time.
Drift Bottle, as shown in Fig. 2, helps users start a conversation with a stranger by throwing or picking up a bottle
from a message pool. When a user picks up a drift bottle that
contains a text or audio message created by another WeChat
user, the user can read/hear the message and choose to reply
to the original creator.
c 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Copyright Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
1
427
The latest English version of WeChat calls it People Nearby.
Related Work
Social Interactions in Urban Environments: Public,
Private and Parochial Space
Social scientists have long been interested in understanding social interactions that emerge in urban environments.
How we understand and experience urban spaces are largely
based on who is present relative to how we engage socially
within them – that is, different spaces have varying social
features (Lofland 1998). Lofland identifies three kinds of urban social spaces - private, public and parochial - and their
distinct features, as derived based on the relationships within
them (Lofland 1998).
The first type of social space, the private realm, is characterized by relationships with known others. In this space,
people often interact with close family and friends. Examples include people socializing in their home or apartment.
The second type of social space, the public realm, is defined as non-private sectors outside of private residences,
where individuals in co-presence do not know one another,
or only know one another categorically (e.g., taxi driver).
Although people in the public realm may not share the same
history or perspectives, they still interact according to wellestablished social norms (Goffman 2008). For example, people typically do not bump into or stare at other people, or
listen in on other people’s conversations.
The third type of social space, the parochial realm, is a
space in-between the public and private. It is defined as a
social realm where there is some commonality between the
people within that space. The work place is an example of
this type of parochial space, as people may not know one
another, but they have a sense of commonality in that they
work in the same building. As such, the parochial realm can
be defined as relationships between people and place.
Figure 1: Using “Shake”: step 1, shake your phone; step 2,
find another user who also just shook his/her phone; step 3,
can choose to message the other user.
Figure 2: Using “Drift bottle”: step 1, pick a bottle; step 2,
read/hear the message in the bottle and can reply
MIMs and the Social Realms: Towards the
Conceptualization of a Fourth “Space”
Most relevant to our study are investigations of Mobile Instant Messengers (MIMs), such as WhatsApp and Grindr, as
they begin to blur the line between the public, private and
parochial realms. MIMs are mobile and can be used in any
realm, but also have features that are public, private and/or
parochial. For example, the mobile phone can be used in
any realm, e.g. at home, work, or malls, but its use is in line
with the ways in which people typically interact in the private realm, as people use their mobile phone to interact with
close ties such as family members (Humphreys 2010).
Studies of MIMs have mostly focused on their use in
either the public, private or parochial realms (Humphreys
2010). This leads to the question: How are MIMs changing the way we conceptualize relationships in these social realms? Recent studies of MIMs such as WhatsApp
(O’Hara et al. 2014), Facebook (Viswanath et al. 2009),
Grindr (Blackwell, Birnholtz, and Abbott 2015), and Dodgeball (Humphreys 2010), have started to address this gap.
On the one hand, these studies have found that these
technologies augment and reinforce typical social dynamics that characterize the private sphere. For example, WhatsApp users often use the technology because of its low cost,
Figure 3: “Look Around” results sorted by distance
Look Around, as shown in Fig. 3, allows a user to find
other nearby users who have also used this feature. The results page provides a list of users sorted by geographical distance. The user can choose to send messages to others who
can be strangers. When enabling the Look Around feature,
the system has access to a user’s geographical locations and
may present his or her profile in other users’ Look Around
results pages.
428
Methodology
and due to peer pressure from their close circle of friends
(Church and de Oliveira 2013). One of its primary uses is
“dwelling” with their close ties by exchanging tidbits of
their lives in a casual and continuous manner (O’Hara et al.
2014). Similarly, Facebook is used primarily to maintain relationships (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe 2007), promote
feelings of belonging (Valenzuela, Park, and Kee 2009), to
maintain connectivity, and for entertainment (Park, Kee, and
Valenzuela 2009). In other words, whether people are using WhatsApp or Facebook in private, public or parochial
spaces, they use them to maintain strong ties and interact
with other people who typically comprise the private realm.
What is changing is that this form of interaction can take
place in lieu of time and space constraints.
We conducted a total of 36 semi-structured interviews in two
rounds from 2013 to 2015. The research team consists of
native English and Chinese speakers. We are WeChat users
ourselves, but do not have any connection with Tencent, the
developer of WeChat. We started with 25 semi-structured interviews to explore why and how people use WeChat, then
followed up with 11 interviews focusing on the three social
features as their use continued to emerge during our first
round and we wanted to explore their uses more deeply.
In the first-round of 25 interviews, we started by asking
how informants heard about WeChat, how long they have
used WeChat, and why they use WeChat. We then asked
them about the features they usually use in WeChat, and
asked them to give us examples of their recent use of the
platform. Next, we asked them to show us their WeChat
contact list, tell us who these people are, and what kinds of
topics they chat about. We then asked questions about any
issues or concerns they have regarding WeChat. Lastly, we
asked them if a friend of theirs just started using WeChat,
what suggestions they would give to this friend.
Preliminary results of the first-round interviews suggested
that there are a wide range of uses of the novel social features
of WeChat. To uncover uses of these social features, we conducted a second-round of 11 interviews focusing on the use
of Shake, Drift Bottle, and Look Around. We asked participants questions about whether they used those three social
features and why. If they said yes, we asked them to provide
an in-depth account of the last time they used each social
feature (if applicable), why they used that feature, what they
found, what they did in response, etc.
Both interview protocols were designed in Chinese. Three
researchers conducted interviews with 36 Chinese WeChat
users, 19 living in Mainland China and 17 living in the US.
We conducted interviews in both locales as a way to diversify our sample. The study was approved by the IRB.
Each interview lasted between 30-60 minutes and was
conducted in Mandarin Chinese. The three researchers who
conducted interviews are native Chinese speakers and followed the same interview protocol. We recruited our participants through personal and professional connections as well
as “snowball” sampling technique (Biernacki and Waldorf
1981) where, after each interview, we asked if the interviewee could recommend other WeChat users to participate in
our study. By finding informants through multiple seeds our
intent was to limit sampling bias. We did not provide monetary remuneration to interviewees for their participation.
Most interviewees were college students or young professionals in their early 20’s except for three interviewees in
China, two of them were managers in their early 40’s and the
third was in her 50’s and retired. 76% of interviewees were
female. All interviewees use WeChat regularly and most of
them had been using WeChat for at least six months.
We took notes during the interviews. In addition, most
interviews were audio recorded upon participants’ permissions and transcribed in Chinese and then translated into
English (not everyone on our team was a native Chinese
speaker). The research team held several analysis sessions
to review and discuss the interview results and three re-
On the other hand, the use of the mobile phone - a technology with features from the private realm - creates a tension in public space. Humphreys, in examining the use of
mobile phones in public settings, describes various issues
that emerge, including: eavesdropping and the inability to
control who is listening (Humphreys 2005). Most importantly, mobile phone use in public settings makes people
less “socially minded” - that is, as they navigate the public and engage in voice conversations, they are not respecting the norms that typically govern interaction. This implies
that some technologies may be changing the social dynamics
that characterize the public, private and parochial realms.
The changing characteristics of the social realm, as a
by-product of mobile technology use, may be most salient
amongst newly emerging MIMs, such as Grindr and Dodgeball. Blackwell et al. (Blackwell, Birnholtz, and Abbott
2015) in a study of Grindr discuss how MIMs are “cosituation technologies” in that they aggregate individuals
into a single virtual space based on geographic proximity. In
a case study of Dodgeball, Humphreys found that Dodgeball
enables its users to parochialize otherwise public spaces by
allowing friends to share their locations and facilitate coordination of congregation (Humphreys 2010). She notes that
“when Dodgeball members congregated in public spaces,
they could experience such places as parochial realms instead of public realms because of their familiar social relations therein” (Humphreys 2010).
In this paper, we shift our analytic attention to WeChat.
To our knowledge, few studies have examined the use of this
platform. Our prior work found that WeChat users not only
dwell together with their close ties, but also have fleeting
encounters with strangers on WeChat (Wang, Li, and Tang
2015).
WeChat is unique in that it has built in social features
that afford public, private and parochial interaction. Whereas
previous work has focused on technologies that are either
distinctly public, private or parochial, or the use of technology in the public, private or parochial realms, WeChat creates a new space where the lines between the social spheres
become blurred. This leads to our main research question:
How is WeChat reinforcing or challenging existing social
interactions and enabling new interactions?
429
searchers iteratively coded the data through an open coding process (Lofland et al. 2005). We had about 70 initial
codes covering different types of contacts such as parent
and strangers, use of WeChat features such as QR codes
and profile pictures, types of behavior such as chatting and
stealing WeChat accounts, and types of feelings related to
WeChat usage such as fun and risky. We then categorized
post-hoc and grouped these initial codes into a set of highlevel themes (Lofland et al. 2005), which in turn were refined using evidence from the interview data to develop the
categories presented in this paper.
one’s personal Guanxi network is considered as a private resource (Ai 2006). However, through the chat group feature
(maximum 100 group members, group content only accessible to members), people can be in the same group chat even
if they are not connected as friends. This effectively creates
an ephemeral social network for WeChat users, which serves
as a re-configuration of how Guanxi is typically enacted.
WeChat users also use other social features with their
friends. For instance, one informant, Qiang, talked about
using Shake with his friends in a party. Qiang is a young
male graduate student, pursuing his master degree in US. He
said “It was very convenient to add my friends using Shake
when we were physically together as we didn’t bother entering or searching IDs. We “shook” together after a short
time countdown and then matched with each other. It is cool
since you don’t have to search, or type each other’s number,
or scan QR code.” Qiang’s story illustrates that this type
of WeChat usage not only provides convenience and fun,
but also enhances how Guanxi is enacted, paradoxically, via
computer-mediated interactions in face-to-face settings.
Liang is a master student in the US. He talked about how
he used WeChat to keep his parents updated about his daily
life. He illustrated to us, “I post a moment almost everyday,
which is actually what they want me to do because they want
to know what I am doing here. Since we usually only call
each other on weekends, posting moments would make them
not worry about me. After I post, they just read. They won’t
reply or thumb up. But when we call each other, they would
ask me why you posted this, why you posted that, where you
have been, etc.” What we see here is a reconfiguration of the
parent-child Guanxi through an ensemble of WeChat features where Liang provided his parents peace of mind about
his life in a foreign country and his parents expressed their
care about their son.
Findings
We present our findings illustrating how WeChat reinforces,
reconfigures, and enhances social practices of Chinese users
within this fourth and collapsed social space: dwelling with
close friends and family members, meeting strangers, finding communities, searching for romantic partners, and seeking local information.
WeChat Use in Private Space
The private space is characterized by relationships with
known others such as friends and family (Lofland 1998). Our
findings corroborate prior research that MIM users “dwell”
with their close friends and families by continuously sharing
tidbits of their lives on MIMs (e.g., WhatsApp (O’Hara et al.
2014), WeChat (Wang, Li, and Tang 2015)).
Reconfiguration of Guanxi maintenance What is
unique, however, is observing the use of WeChat in private
space relative to the Chinese concept of Guanxi (personal
connection). Guanxi, at its core, refers to a highly personal
and particularistic connection - one based on similar background, or commonalities - between two individuals (Chen
and Chen 2004). The building of Guanxi relationships
usually starts with identification of common ground such
as sharing the same birthplace, or working at the same
company (Chen and Chen 2004).
Traditionally, family members and close friends often stay
in touch via in-person meetings, letters, emails, phone calls,
text messages, and more recently social networking services
(SNS). We found that WeChat serves to reinforce Guanxi by
offering a cheap and convenient alternative to maintaining
strong ties. Seven informants reported that WeChat facilitates their ties with friends and family members.
For example, Yue, a retired Chinese informant in her 50’s,
described usually using the phone to call her co-workers
if she had something to tell them. After starting a WeChat
chat group, however, if someone wanted to initiate a casual
hang-out, they would inform everyone via the group chat.
She commented: “I could get the messages immediately in
WeChat. Everyone is sending voice messages. It is so much
faster than typing. I don’t have to follow up with them all the
time. As long as I spent one hour or two every day checking
WeChat, I’d know what my friends were doing.”
It is important to note that unlike SNS services such as
Facebook, WeChat was designed such that its users cannot see their friends’ contact lists (or Guanxi network) on
WeChat. This aligns with traditional Guanxi practice where
WeChat Use in Public Space
Unlike private space, public space is typified by strangers.
One distinct characteristic of the three novel WeChat social features is that they enable random encounters among
strangers without any commonality.
Opportunistic encounters: forming instrumental ties
In understanding the interpersonal relationships in China,
Hwang talks about the notion of instrumental ties, which
serve only as a means to attain certain goals, which, for
example, happen between salesmen and customers, or bus
drivers and passengers (Hwang 1987). Such relationships
are often unstable and temporary. Traditionally, instrumental ties are often formed by participating in public events or
when interacting in public spaces.
Whereas instrumental ties are typically developed in public spaces, Chinese sociologists have noted the “stayed
home” phenomenon in China in recent years. The “stayed
home” phenomenon refers to how people ( particularly
young people) prefer to stay at home and surf the Internet
rather than going out to socialize (Ping Jiang 2009).
WeChat, however, enables new ways of meeting with
strangers where people do not have to physically travel to
public spaces to meet and interact with strangers, thus serv-
430
ing to reconfigure this form of interaction. The desire to meet
with people was indeed a common reason reported by five of
our informants. The WeChat social features spontaneously
match people with strangers virtually. Thus, WeChat allows
people to form instrumental ties with strangers.
For example, Jiayi, a graduate student in China, has used
all three social features to meet with strangers. She wanted
to know different people and make more friends through
WeChat. She recalled “I met a friend through Drift Bottle.
I sent out a message [in a bottle] and he responded. In the
next two months, we chatted quite often about our past and
current situations. He then said he liked me and wanted to
see me in person. But, I felt it’s too far between us and unrealistic to have a relationship with him. So, I only chatted
with him on WeChat, but we are still in touch.”
While this relationship did not cement as a serious romantic relationship, Jiayi still found value in this relationship,
fulfilling her need to talk to people even on private topics.
She elaborated, “I feel it is really magical to meet someone
interesting via WeChat. I actually like to talk about some private things to those ‘friends’ because they won’t get into my
real-life social networks.” Jiayi did not know who uses these
social features nor what to expect from these social features.
But, the invisibility and ambiguity of the larger user community coupled with the sense of randomness and serendipity
in WeChat contribute to the “magical” appeal.
vet for matched users for further interactions, e.g. by checking their profile pictures.
Another Chinese female informant, Qi, shared a similar
story, “I first learned about the Shake feature from a Chinese dating TV show called Love Battle’ and many couples
on this show got to know each other via Shake. I became really curious about the Shake feature. It sounded like a new
version of Momo [another popular Chinese MIM known for
hook-ups]. I took a bystander’s attitude to try it. But I got
matched with people that I had no interest to talk to.” In this
case, the popular TV show to some extent legitimizes the
use of the WeChat Shake feature to seek romantic relationships. Qi continued, “Those people were like uncle-aged and
young Chinese guys. However, I didn’t add any of them [as a
friend]. Basically every time I was matched with people who
looked horny in their photos, I was scared away.”
Qi’s experience highlights that different people may have
varying intentions in using WeChat. Since a formal technical mechanism or a set of social practices around proper use
does not exist and, as such, there is not an easy way to make
intentionality visible. Moreover, individual norms dictating
appropriate use or expectations of use differ and even clash.
While Qi did not use WeChat to seek romantic partners, others did. As a result, their intentions and expectations misaligned and Qi got scared away.
WeChat Use in Parochial Space
Romance seeking and intention clashes
The parochial space is in-between the public and private
spaces and is defined by a sense of commonality among people within that space (Lofland 1998).
WeChat also influences how some people seek romantic relationships. Marriage was traditionally arranged as a family
business by the parents to align with the social hierarchy. In
modern China, the young generation is given more freedom
in choosing their own partners. They develop romantic relationships with their classmates, colleagues, or friends, or
through introductions made by others.
The three novel WeChat social features allow a user to get
“matched” to another random user. At least some WeChat
users take advantage of these features to seek romantic partners, serving as a reconfiguration of traditional practices.
While none of our informants reported doing this themselves, five of them reported receiving such romance seeking
messages.
For example, Mei, who lives in China said that she used
Look Around and got a number of matched people from the
results list. She told us “I shaked my phone and there was a
sound, then I got a bunch of people in my list. Those people
were probably nearby. They looked like those in dating websites and sent messages like ‘hi pretty girl, add me.’ It was so
scary and I turned it off immediately. I care about people’s
appearances. I look at their profile pictures. When I saw profile pictures where I knew they were the kind of people who
used cameras in very dark Internet Cafes to take selfies, I
couldn’t tolerate that. So, there’s no need to take a closer
look at their profiles. No interest at all.” The social features of WeChat that connect people with strangers served
as a departure from and reconfiguration of traditional social
practices and norms as this use is counter to how Guanxi is
typically enacted. As such, Mei developed new practices to
Location-based Guanxi development The novel social
features of WeChat, such as Shake and Look Around, can
help users find people that share commonalities with them.
In other words, the platform supports the construction of
Guanxi ties. Here we report how five informants used the
novel social features of WeChat to establish Guanxi ties in
unfamiliar environments where the platform both reinforces
and enhances traditional practices.
One informant, Lu, moved from China to earn her master’s degree in the US. After two years of studying, she
moved to a new city in the US for an internship. Lu used
both Shake and Look Around to determine if there were any
Chinese colleagues in her new company because, as she described: “I only knew few people in my company. So I wanted
to meet some Chinese colleagues.”
Although she found Chinese users in the Look Around results list, she chose not to initiate conversations with them
through WeChat because she did not want to friend strangers
that she had not yet met in the company. “I could find Chinese people every time I use Shake. But I did not interact
with any of them because their photos were horny and I did
not want to talk with stranger. I had never met them in the
company. They might be in the companies next door.”
She further checked their profiles, particularly their profile pictures, even if they were in the same company. Lu recalled “One of them looked familiar to me. He might work in
my company. I thought I knew him. But I was not sure. So I
431
Space
Private
Interactions
Relationships with known others, e.g. family
Public
Individuals in co-presence do not know one another
Interact via well-established norms
Parochial
Affordances of WeChat
Can use IM and SNS features to maintain relationships or “dwell” with close ties
Can use social features for opportunistic interaction
Look Around can connect people together in public
spaces and lead to unexpected types of interaction
Can use social features for opportunistic interaction
Commonality between people
People to people and people to place relationships
Can locate information and resources using Look
Around
Table 1: Interactions and affordances supported by WeChat in different types of spaces
seek information locally.
For example, Na, a 27 year-old informant, reported her
use of Shake to receive posts about local cafes and accessory
stores. “I just wanted to get updates from those stores, so that
if I saw something interesting, I would like to buy. It is really
convenient and helpful to get information.”
Similarly, Chao told us how he used WeChat for very specific purposes. He explained, “I wanted to buy used furniture
or books locally, and people advertised these on online forums and left their WeChat accounts, so I added them in
WeChat to negotiate.”
However, seeking information via the social features of
WeChat also comes with a cost. Di, a female informant, used
Look around to seek information about her lost cat. She explained, “I lost my cat and wanted to use Look Around to find
my cat, but I ended up getting harassing messages for hookups.” While Di’s example highlights the potential risks of
seeking information this way, Na and Chao’s uses of the social features suggest that WeChat affords an alternative way
to seek information in the local community, reconfiguring
how Guanxi is developed between local residents as well as
the relationship between people and local businesses.
checked his WeChat profile. His photo looked weird. Not my
type. So I lost the motivation to talk with him.”
While in the study of Dodgeball Humphreys proposed the
idea of parochialization of public space (Humphreys 2010),
here, Lu’s experience illustrates location-based Guanxi
building where the people may not know each other previously. Lu predicted where it was likely to find the people
that she hoped to connect (in this case, Chinese colleagues
at her new workplace) and selectively used the Shake and
Look Around features for the purpose of building Guanxi.
One value of these social features is then to allow users to
more easily establish commonality when transitioning into
new settings.
Cranshaw et al. propose the notion of location entropy
to measure the diversity of people who visit a certain location (Cranshaw et al. 2010). They found that locations with
high entropy are more likely to be shared in location sharing
systems than locations with low entropy (Cranshaw et al.
2010). Our study illustrates an important counter-example
whereby we found that people like Lu wanted to use Shake
and Look Around in a location with low entropy. In other
words, she wanted to find people that have certain characteristics (Chinese colleagues), i.e., low diversity of the people
around a location, using the novel feature of WeChat to filter
the population in her local context.
The novel social features of WeChat support the enactment of traditional Guanxi practices, albeit in new ways.
Whereas people typically form Guanxi ties through recommendations from family and friends, here people were able
to use WeChat to filter people within a given location in an
effort to establish commonality and expand their social networks by forming weak ties.
Discussion
Our findings highlight how public, private, and parochial
spaces collapse into WeChat, a single socio-technical system
which is filled with users’ varying and sometimes conflicting
intentions. The results also suggest that WeChat reinforces,
reconfigures, and enhances many social practices of Chinese users. Reinforcement refers to the ways in which traditional social practices were manifested through the technology. Reconfiguration refers to the ways in which new and
emergent uses were counter to traditional social practices.
Enhancement refers to how the technology was used to improve how traditional social practices were enacted.
Seeking local information Traditionally in China, people
rely on mass media to receive local news, advertisements,
etc. In addition, they often walk around in their local communities or talk with neighbors to seek interesting information about various things, e.g., local events (Wang and Wang
2014).
The social features of WeChat, however, reconfigures
how Chinese citizens typically seek information within local communities. Using Shake and Look Around allowed our
informants to tap into their local communities thus providing an alternative channel to address their information needs.
Three informants reported that WeChat facilitated them to
Uniqueness of WeChat
WeChat is one of the many MIMs in the market. However,
what is it about WeChat that makes it unique? First, the juxtaposition of various features provides different affordances
for social interactions and permeates different spaces: public, private, and parochial. Table 1 lists the different types of
interactions and affordances provided by WeChat. The communication and SNS features are often used by our informants to “dwell” with their close ties, which characterize
432
The Implications of Space Collapse
the private space. The opportunistic social features are used
for seeking people with commonality (e.g., employees in the
same company) and interacting with strangers. These practices characterize parochial and public spaces, respectively.
Second, the co-presence and blurring of different spaces
in WeChat comes with ambiguity and lack of clear norms.
Most MIMs have relatively clear purposes and uses, and thus
have a set of social norms dictating use. For instance, WhatsApp is primarily intended for close relationships (O’Hara
et al. 2014) while Grinder is used for dating and hook-ups
amongst the gay community (Blackwell, Birnholtz, and Abbott 2015). In comparison, WeChat affords many types of
interactions and can be used for different purposes (e.g.,
dwelling with family and friends, seeking romantic relationships). As such, a confluence of actors with varying motivations co-exist on the platform and we propose that this is
leading to “space collapse.”
As articulated through our work, Chinese social structures
are dominated by hierarchal relationships, and the ways in
which people interact in private, public and parochial spaces
conform to the norms and structures present within Chinese
society. For example, Guanxi ties are traditionally enacted
through friends and family; romantic relationships are typically established through formal processes whereby parents
negotiate relationships for their children; information is typically acquired through formal news agencies; etc.
On the one hand, people were using WeChat in such a
way where they were reproducing Chinese social structures
by tapping into different and separate spaces characterized
by the social relationships therein. For example, some of
our informants were maintaining Guanxi ties by dwelling
with close friends and family members over each other’s
Moments or walls. As such, people might give precedence
to different spaces. In our sample, some people focused on
the private space over public or parochial spaces. Some of
the social features in WeChat are location-based such as the
Look Around feature. Troshynski et al. discuss the notion
of accountability of presence where sharing location is not
merely sharing where one is or went, but as a form of cultural production or social participation of some social groups
or relationships (Troshynski, Lee, and Dourish 2008). In
other words, the sharing of location conveys not only where
you are but also an aspect of who you are (Troshynski, Lee,
and Dourish 2008). Similarly, WeChat users’ precedence of
one type of space over others contribute to who they are.
Moreover, WeChat use also served to re-configure Chinese social structures when typical interactions in one space
(e.g., the private sphere) were reshaped by the actions typical of another space (e.g., the public sphere). In this sense,
whereas Chinese social structures are typically hierarchical,
when these spaces were collapsed this signaled a shift to
more horizontal structures that are atypical of Chinese social structures. For example, people were interacting with
strangers in ways they normally would not; and people were
seeking romantic partners without going through traditional,
familial structures.
Lastly, going beyond the Chinese cultural context that situate WeChat uses, we note that when designers create MIMs
or other social technologies, they should be mindful about
the implications of combining different social features in a
single platform. In WeChat’s case, the mixture of different
communication and social features targeted at known ties
and strangers provides a powerful social application, but
also introduces space collapse. Not everyone has the same
values. Friedman and colleagues propose value-sensitive design as a generic design approach that supports values, such
as user autonomy and privacy, in system design (Friedman
1996; Friedman, Kahn, and Borning 2008). Dourish and
Bell describe collective imagining, where the design process
leads to technological progress that brings about alternative
futures (Dourish and Bell 2014). Moreover, this collective
imagining happens prior to design, embedding our cultural
and social interpretations of the world into what is being designed (Dourish and Bell 2014). While we are not aware of
whether or not Tencent used the value-sensitive design ap-
Characteristics of Space Collapse
WeChat collapses together the three social spheres (public,
private, and parochial) into one, bounded technical system.
Space collapse, then, happens when the systems is used in
any given space in the real world. In other words, the intersection between WeChat and uses at home, at work/in the
neighborhood, or in the public realm, create a fourth space.
We refer to the emergence of a fourth space as space collapse. There are two characteristics of space collapse.
The first is the aforementioned confluence of different intentions and as such, a lack of universally accepted norms
and expectations, and in turn potential intention clashes.
The social matching system in WeChat does not know people’s true intentions. As a result, people have to navigate the
murky water of conflicting intentionality themselves. But,
when the intentions matched, it felt like magic as one informant suggested. This points to an important design question:
should the system be socially translucent (Erickson and Kellogg 2000) or opaque? Or, in other words, should systems
make users and their activities visible to each other? Socially translucent systems promote awareness and accountability (Erickson and Kellogg 2000), but the social opaqueness of the social features (e.g., Drift Bottle) in WeChat also
contributes to its “magical” appeal. Our goal here is not to
offer prescriptive de-contextualized design suggestions, but
to highlight potential implications of these design choices.
The second characteristic of space collapse is the coexistence and collapse of spaces. Marwick and boyd describe how social media users tend to collapse multiple audiences into a single context, and as such, it is challenging for
them to maintain different faces as they interact with these
different audiences in the offline world (Marwick and Boyd
2011). Similarly, we believe that WeChat performs a similar function, where WeChat usage tends to collapse multiple
spaces. In this view, the three kinds of urban spaces and the
typical norms dictating social interaction therein, are all collapsed together in a socio-technical system. When the norms
and structures that dictate interaction in the physical world
environment are all joined together, this leads to an important question-what are the implications of space collapse?
433
proach or embedded the ensemble of WeChat features as a
way to bring about an alternative future in Chinese society,
the implications, from our sample, are rather compelling.
Chen, X.-P., and Chen, C. C. 2004. On the Intricacies of the
Chinese Guanxi: A Process Model of Guanxi Development.
Asia Pacific Journal of Management 21(3):305–324.
Church, K., and de Oliveira, R. 2013. What’s up with whatsapp?: comparing mobile instant messaging behaviors with
traditional SMS. In Proceedings of the 15th International
Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile
Devices and Services, 352–361.
Cranshaw, J.; Toch, E.; Hong, J.; Kittur, A.; and Sadeh, N.
2010. Bridging the Gap Between Physical Location and Online Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp
’10, 119–128. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Dourish, P., and Bell, G. 2014. ”Resistance is Futile”: Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 18(4):769–778.
Ellison, N. B.; Steinfield, C.; and Lampe, C. 2007. The
benefits of facebook “Friends:” social capital and college
students use of online social network sites. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 12(4):1143–1168.
Erickson, T., and Kellogg, W. A. 2000. Social Translucence:
An Approach to Designing Systems That Support Social
Processes. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 7(1):59–83.
Friedman, B.; Kahn, P. H.; and Borning, A. 2008. Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems. In Associateessor,
JD, K. E. H., and scholar/ethicist, H. T. T. L. v., eds., The
Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. John Wiley
& Sons, Inc. 69–101.
Friedman, B. 1996. Value-sensitive Design. Interactions
3(6):16–23.
Goffman, E. 2008. Behavior in Public Places. Simon and
Schuster.
Humphreys, L. 2005. Cellphones in public: Social interaction in a wireless era. New Media & Society 7(6):810–833.
Humphreys, L. 2010. Mobile social networks and urban
public space. New Media & Society 12(5):763–778.
Hwang, K.-k. 1987. Face and Favor: The Chinese Power
Game. American Journal of Sociology 92(4):944–974.
Lofland, J.; Snow, D. A.; Anderson, L.; and Lofland, L. H.
2005. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning, 4
edition edition.
Lofland, L. H. 1998. The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s
Quintessential Social Territory. Transaction Publishers.
Marwick, A. E., and Boyd, D. 2011. I Tweet Honestly,
I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and
the Imagined Audience. New Media & Society 13(1):114–
133.
O’Hara, K. P.; Massimi, M.; Harper, R.; Rubens, S.; and
Morris, J. 2014. Everyday Dwelling with WhatsApp. In
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 1131–1143.
Park, N.; Kee, K. F.; and Valenzuela, S. 2009. Being
Immersed in Social Networking Environment: Facebook
Limitations
There are several limitations of our study. First, we used a
snowball sampling technique to recruit participants and thus
the results are subject to self-selection bias. Second, our
results are self-reported which might be affected by social
desirability bias (Arnold and Feldman 1981) where people
withhold reporting certain behaviors that may seem inappropriate (e.g., “hook-ups”). Third, our empirical research
focuses on one MIM, WeChat, and its novel social features.
Therefore, our research findings may not be generalizable to
other MIMs particularly because they do not have the opportunistic social features that WeChat has. However, future
research can examine whether other MIMs or social computing systems exhibit signs of space collapse. Fourth, our
participants were all Chinese WeChat users. Since there are a
large number of non-Chinese WeChat users, our results may
only present part of the phenomenon. Future studies can investigate how users of different cultural background interact
in such a social MIM environment. Lastly, most of our interviews were conducted in 2013 and 2015. The significant
time gap may have some impact on our results, for example,
the evolving user behaviors in WeChat.
Conclusion
While mobile instant messengers (MIMs) are getting popular around the world, relatively little research studies their
usage. We studied a particular MIM, WeChat. Our findings
suggest that WeChat creates a fourth space - one that is
public, private and parochial - as it collapses various social
spheres together. Within this fourth space there exists a confluence of people with different intentions and needs, and
typical Chinese social practices and Guanxi were reinforced,
reconfigured or enhanced as a result. The notion of space
collapse which refers to the emergence of a fourth space offers a complementary perspective to understand MIM uses.
Acknowledgements
We thank Zhiheng Mai and Zhining Gao for providing assistance to the research. We also thank our participants for
sharing their insights.
References
Ai, J. 2006. Guanxi Networks in China: Its Importance and
Future Trends. China & World Economy 14(5):105–118.
Arnold, H. J., and Feldman, D. C. 1981. Social desirability
response bias in self-report choice situations. Academy of
Management Journal 24(2):377–385.
Biernacki, P., and Waldorf, D. 1981. Snowball Sampling:
Problems and Techniques of Chain Referral Sampling. Sociological Methods & Research 10(2):141–163.
Blackwell, C.; Birnholtz, J.; and Abbott, C. 2015. Seeing
and being seen: Co-situation and impression formation using Grindr, a location-aware gay dating app. New Media &
Society 17(7):1117–1136.
434
Groups, Uses and Gratifications, and Social Outcomes. CyberPsychology & Behavior 12(6):729–733.
Ping Jiang. 2009. The ”Stayed Home Men and Women”
Phenomenon in China. China Youth Study 8:81–83.
Tencent. 2015. Tencent Announces 2015 Third Quarter Results.
Troshynski, E.; Lee, C.; and Dourish, P. 2008. Accountabilities of Presence: Reframing Location-based Systems. In
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors
in Computing Systems, CHI ’08, 487–496. New York, NY,
USA: ACM.
Valenzuela, S.; Park, N.; and Kee, K. F. 2009. Is There
Social Capital in a Social Network Site?: Facebook Use
and College Students’ Life Satisfaction, Trust, and Participation1. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
14(4):875–901.
Viswanath, B.; Mislove, A.; Cha, M.; and Gummadi, K. P.
2009. On the evolution of user interaction in facebook. In
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Online social networks, WOSN ’09, 37–42. New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Wang, B., and Wang, J. 2014. Communication and Collective Action within Neighbors: An Explorative Investigation
of Chinese Urban Citizens’ Media Use in Community Context. News and Communication Research (Chinese) 12:90–
121.
Wang, Y.; Li, Y.; and Tang, J. 2015. Dwelling and Fleeting
Encounters: Exploring Why People Use WeChat - A Mobile
Instant Messenger. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM
Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA ’15, 1543–1548. New York, NY,
USA: ACM.
435